GIRLS PLAY DEAD: Acts of Self-Preservation, by Jen Percy
There was a meme that spread on TikTok last year that I still think about. It began as a joke, an interviewer asking women on the street who they’d rather be stuck alone in the woods with: a man or a bear. A bear, the women said, over and over again, at first laughing, and then serious.
Jen Percy’s riveting and provocative new book, “Girls Play Dead,” is perhaps the journalistic manifestation of that viral trend. Percy, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, who has reported on trauma in war zones and survivors’ responses to sexual assault, grew up in rural Oregon, where she spent much of her childhood in the wilderness.
Her mother was a naturalist, and she taught her young daughter to play dead in the woods — to drop to the forest floor, still and silent, to outsmart a predator. “My mother thought she could keep me safe from bears,” Percy writes, “which would translate to keeping me safe from men.”
“Girls Play Dead” is about all the ways that Percy, and generations of women, were not able to keep themselves safe — and the often strange and misunderstood ways that women respond to sexual trauma.
It’s a dark subject, but Percy’s lyrical prose and skilled storytelling make even the most harrowing sequences read like a novel. The book is told in vignettes, weaving in reporting and literary references with scientific research. It is not always linear, but this is purposeful — stories of trauma are often not.
“No one in America had bothered to study the psychological responses of rape victims until the early 1970s,” Percy writes. And yet understanding those responses is precisely what makes those stories stand up in court; it is essential to whether women are considered “believable.”
Percy tells of her grandmother, whose own mother had stabbed her abusive father in the heart, and who later left her children for a cult. Percy’s mother, who was assaulted by a relative at age 16, and who had worked in the logging and forestry industries with men, experiencing a dangerous accident while on the job, taught her daughter to hide her pain, and to survive in the wilderness.
Percy writes poignantly of how, in her own life, sometimes these “acts of self-preservation” were not about direct violence at all, but about the subtleties of simply being a woman in the world. She describes the summer she spent not going in the water at the lake when she was 13 — because she feared being looked at by a male lifeguard who, if she were drowning, might think she was ugly, making embarrassing sounds. “At 13, the thought of this was much worse than drowning.”
She describes spending another summer in a house with five guys who, night after night, would sit on the couch watching porn together. “They were all really nice. They never touched me,” she writes. “There was just the porn, always on.”
There were the soccer coaches she and a friend met on a trip to the Canary Islands, who drugged them at a bar, then began to assault them in a dingy back room. After escaping, “we laughed about it and went back to the hotel and slept.” There was the man in Seville whom she told she did not want to have sex with, but who put on a condom anyway, just in case. “I thought of saying no one more time, but I was tired and I didn’t want to be rude.”
Afterward, she writes, “I wanted to see him again right away. I thought by seeing him and spending time with him, it would mean we had spent a normal night together and this was a normal relationship.”
These are stories that many women will recognize: the nuances, the gray areas, the regret. “Self-preservation doesn’t always look like what we imagine it does,” Percy writes. “The woman who falls asleep next to her abuser isn’t getting comfortable, she’s experiencing the adrenaline dump that follows an experience of primal terror.”
Percy writes about how the stories of strangers in books helped her feel less alone. She began collecting these stories, asking women she met, “What normalizing thing did you do immediately after your rape?”
I comforted him and said it was okay.
I convinced him to be my boyfriend.
I told him I couldn’t wait to do it again.
And then there was the experience of the rape itself. One response Percy hears again and again is from women who described themselves as “frozen” — struck by a state of temporary paralysis, or complete immobility, “unable to scream or move their limbs.”
Another name for this behavior is “tonic immobility,” Percy tells us — or “thanatosis,” defined as “the ancient Greek word for preparing for death.” As it turns out, freezing is a common evolutionary response used by animals, who play dead in the face of an attack, because “predators seem hard-wired to lose interest in dead prey, as their meat could harbor deadly bacteria.” “Freezing,” a neuroscientist tells Percy, “has had survival value across the eons.”
Percy first made this connection after seeing a video of a possum that was playing dead. Then she read the victim statement of Jessica Mann, one of Harvey Weinstein’s accusers, who described feeling “immobile” as he allegedly raped her. “Mann cited a 2015 paper in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry on the automatic defense behaviors of humans and animals.” Ironically, Percy notes, it is precisely the victims’ immobility that causes many rape trials to fall apart.
At times it can be hard to read Percy’s many stories of broken women. During a section about Kim, who was raped in college and developed debilitating epileptic-like seizures a year later, as she was preparing to go to trial, I had to get up and take a walk.
Then there is the complicated story of Chelsea, whose rapist was sent to prison, but who admits to Percy during their interview that she lied about saying “no” during the encounter. Percy is torn about what to do with this information; she ultimately shares it and Chelsea is charged with “fraud against the court” — and yet the man remains in prison. What are we to make of her story, and his?
Then again, part of what makes “Girls Play Dead” so good — and so different from much other journalism on this subject — is that Percy is not telling readers what to think. She is simply allowing them to feel, by telling the stories — including the messy ones, the ones that are difficult to read and the morally complex ones — that have so often been absent.
GIRLS PLAY DEAD: Acts of Self-Preservation | By Jen Percy | Doubleday | 259 pp. | $29
Jessica Bennett is a contributing editor in the Opinion section of The Times. She teaches journalism at New York University and is the author of “Feminist Fight Club” and “This Is 18.”
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